Acephalous: Measuring The Speed of Meme: An Experiment in which You Will Participate, Or Else...
So, this guy wants to prove . . . what? I forget. Something about how high traffic blogs convey ideas, and low traffic blogs . . . I don't know what they do, either.
Well, I got this link from Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly, which is definitely a high-traffic blog, and this has got to be one of the lowest of low-traffic blogs, so I hope this post helps the experiment.
I participated in a 'moment' a while back, where my formulation of a forming meme got a lot of attention, and it was all a matter of blog comments, being picked up, by Kos among others. If I were an academic, I think I would focus on the role of blog commenters -- I am a commenter, really, not a blogger, the present blog not being 'real', because I don't seek people to read it, I just use it like notepaper.
The other thing I would note is that some so-called "memes" are archetypal -- I think blog triumphalism is itself such an archetype, a pre-existing narrative, into which we fit the facts of the present moment, to satisfy our needs and allay our anxieties. They don't really spread; they just emerge from a pre-existing type-space. The concept of a "coming perfect storm" is such an archetype, a rhetorical trope waiting for its moment, if you will.
Anyway, I have done my bit, for the experimenter. Back to regularly scheduled programming.
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